(2) Mon Jun 25 2012 10:27How to Follow Instructions:
Last week I gave a talk called "How to Follow Instructions" at QCon New York. It's a talk about hypermedia and code on demand, as well as the not-so-great techniques web service designers (myself included) have been using instead of hypermedia and code on demand. The jumping-off point is this story from my seventh grade algebra class, and the process by which we recognize instructions and choose which ones to carry out.

I was very nervous about the talk, because my work on Constellation Games has taken my creative attention out of the world of REST for the past couple years. To me the talk feels more like complaints from a user than advice from an expert. But it was well-received and I may be giving an updated version of "How to Follow Instructions" at REST Fest in September.

Because of that possibility, the text of the talk is still in flux and I'm not going to immediately put in the kind of work I did to get my 2008 QCon talk online with a transcript. But I have put up a PDF of my slide deck (4.0 megabytes), so you can see what I put on screen. And you can see the rhetorical structure of the talk by getting the LibreOffice Impress file (6.3 megabytes), which includes my speaker notes. Both are licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, and anything else I produce from this talk will be put under the same license. (As oppposed to stuff like QCon's video recording of me giving the talk, which they'll probably retain copyright on.)

I know from being on the other end of this that even with speaker notes, a slide deck after the fact is more a mnemonic for people who've already heard the talk than a way of conveying the knowledge contained in the talk. So this is more a show of good faith on my part than anything else. At some point you'll be able to read a transcript of this talk and reuse whatever parts of it turn out to be interesting, as happened with the 2008 talk. But for now the slides and notes are what I have to offer.

(1) Mon Jun 25 2012 14:44Transit of Venus:
I helped pay for my niece Maggie to go to space camp, and in a Kickstarter-like move she sent me in return a drawing of the recent transit of Venus. Or, as Maggie's dictated caption calls it, "The sun and Venus in front of it":